The society’s officers agreed with Hills and Ridley that an ordained minister must run the mission. Duncan could be moved elsewhere, they thought, or forced into a subordinate role. The missionary tried to negotiate around this impasse by proposing that England cease to fund Metlakatla. It would serve as a lay example of self-sufficiency—a model industrial village, which it already was. This suggestion was also rebuffed.
Realizing that a showdown was probably at hand, the society had sent a letter of dismissal for Bishop Ridley to give Duncan if an understanding could not be reached. Neither party was willing to make concessions, and the fateful letter was delivered in the spring of 1882. Duncan, in a fury, immediately moved out of the mission house. The great campaign for Metlakatla was now reaching its final stages.
When Duncan informed the Tsimshian that he was unemployed, they quickly rallied round him and prepared a house for his use. A small group of disgruntled chiefs and their families, about fifty in all, who saw this latest development as a chance to unseat Duncan, declared their support for Ridley. The bishop, greatly outnumbered, decided that the wise course of action might be to absent himself temporarily. He sailed off to London to explain the situation, leaving an uncomfortable William Collison in theoretical charge.
The villagers decided they would establish an independent Christian church with Duncan and carry on as usual. Metlakatla’s latest project—and a major new business venture—was a cannery, and that kept people busy. But Bishop Ridley went on the attack. On his return to BC, he wrote and circulated a sensational pamphlet accusing Duncan of cruelty, and sexual and financial misconduct. Duncan certainly employed corporal punishment at the mission, but no hint of moral impropriety ever attached itself to him over the course of a long career, and his financial record was brilliant. Ridley’s charges were probably based on little else than his deep dislike for his competitor. Victoria, though, was suitably amazed and entertained by this latest scandal.
Things got worse. While Duncan and the bishop were exchanging insulting letters, the two factions at Metlakatla exchanged threats. A small piece of land, less than a hectare, had been reserved in the name of the missionary society. The mission house stood there but not the church or the school or most of the businesses, which were located on the larger First Nations reserve. No one was certain which reserve Duncan’s store was on, so his followers dismantled and moved it, much to Ridley’s anger. The bishop, in turn, announced that the school, which had been built with society money, would be turned into another church, but he was prevented by Duncan and his supporters from making any changes. Then Ridley got into a punch-up with a group of natives over the ownership of a drum. He sent an urgent message to Victoria suggesting that lawlessness and chaos prevailed in the community and that lives—his, in particular, and that of his wife—were in danger.
The government had no choice but to respond. Ridley was a bishop, after all. No navy ship was available, and a US cutter, the Oliver Wolcott, had to be called in. Several dignitaries, including Indian superintendent Dr. Israel Powell and the head of the provincial police, piled aboard, and the Wolcott raced north to protect Metlakatla’s beleaguered minority. They found the village tense but in no danger of civil war, handed out ten-dollar fines to two First Nations men for assault and left, no doubt shaking their heads over the strange behaviour of clerics. Even though the Wolcott’s services were provided for free, this little escapade cost the province $7,000, a pretty sum in 1883.
The following year, after further incidents and a general state of First Nations unrest on the north coast, the government decided to launch an official enquiry into Metlakatla’s problems. As the core issues concerned property ownership, the hearings quickly focused on the question of First Nations land rights, which BC’s bureaucrats had been infamously unsympathetic to over the years. In their report, the enquiry commissioners reinforced old attitudes, which basically held that First Nations people had no land rights whatsoever. The reserves set aside for them were perfectly adequate, and the Crown, not First Nations people or their missionary advisors, would determine the uses those reserves could be put to.
Duncan, anxious that the Metlakatlans should own their land or at least have substantial control over the village, took his fight to Ottawa. He felt that First Nations people should receive individual title to individual plots of reserve land. He wanted guarantees that federal reserves would not be sold or altered. He disputed the right of the Church Missionary Society to any mission property, arguing that the land had merely been reserved in trust. Now that the majority of villagers wished to form an independent church, the property should be handed over to them. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, who was also superintendent general of Indian affairs, slyly agreed with Duncan but authorized no change in policy. After lobbying by church officials, though, he decided to award the disputed reserve to the missionary society.
This last betrayal started Duncan thinking about moving his operation. A missionary society commission descended on Metlakatla and wrote a report criticizing his leadership. In 1886, disputes arose over Ridley’s attempts to survey church land in Metlakatla, and that fall, in a related trespassing case, BC chief justice Matthew Begbie reiterated that the villagers had no legal rights to the land. The Tsimshian village council finally consented to have Duncan go to Washington, DC, and ask for permission to immigrate. There he met Henry Wellcome, a young pharmaceutical magnate and one of his most influential supporters.
At first, US government officials were oblivious to Duncan’s appeals. The last thing the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted was responsibility for a large group of Canadian First Nations people. Then Wellcome, a human publicity dynamo, went to work. For the next four months, Duncan addressed associations and boards, preached in the best and biggest churches and received countless column inches of newspaper coverage. Wellcome formed a committee of twenty-five prominent men to work behind the scenes. His 1887 book, The Story of Metlakahtla, created a huge, appreciative audience for Duncan’s plans.
Duncan even met President Grover Cleveland, who supported the move but was anxious to avoid an international incident. Eventually, US officials confirmed that if the missionary and his followers would select a site and move of their own accord, the government would recognize them and grant them squatters’ rights after they were settled. Duncan sent a message to Metlakatla, and in March 1887, a Tsimshian party set off by canoe. Within two weeks, the group had decided that uninhabited Annette Island, just over 110 kilometres north, fit their needs.
In August, Duncan, along with thirty tonnes of supplies and a portable sawmill, arrived via northbound steamer at Port Chester, a bay on the west side of the island where New Metlakatla was to be established. An advance guard from the old village was waiting, and US flags flew on improvised poles. Speeches were made on the beach, and the passengers and crew of the steamship joined the villagers in celebration. Over the next two weeks, despite Ridley’s opposition, buildings were dismantled and as much of Metlakatla as possible went on an ocean voyage. An enormous motley flotilla—canoes, rafts, fishing boats and virtually every vessel on the north coast that could be borrowed or chartered—ferried back and forth between the two sites. Eight hundred people travelled north. It was one of the largest human exoduses that Canada had ever known.
A week or so after my visit to the original Metlakatla, I flew to Annette Island to look in on the “new” version. Down at the village longhouse, the descendants of the early émigrés were performing for a group of tourists. The men and women of the Fourth Generation Dancers—clad in red and black button blankets, fringed tunics, beaded moccasins and exotic ermine-skin headgear—launched into a welcoming song. As it ended, they blew eagle down over the heads of their audience, then segued to a salmon dance, where some performers were fish and the rest acted like a human seine net. Metlakatla, which dropped “new” from its name long ago, was busy entertaining a few of the half-million cruise ship passengers who would visit nearby Ketchikan that summer (a figure that had risen to nearly 900,000 by 2014).
Outside, the sunny May weather continued. A “chain gang” was hard at work, clearing away garbage, cleaning and painting. Miscreants had been allowed to work off fines for minor offenses by helping prepare for the tourist